As many of you have hopefully seen and/or heard, the staff at EB has been working on a plan to revamp/overhaul/update the full of the site (for the first time in over 10 years) for some time now. We have finally gotten to the point where it's time to reach out to the masses and ask for you to (financially) pitch in. An email should be going out shortly (within the next day or two) to all EB registered email accounts with a link to the actual donation site - any generosity to help with the project would be greatly appreciated.

There will be a degree of details posted on the donation site as to planning and general information/timeline but some basic questions also given below. If you have others, you can ask but not everything will be responded to (I think this common sense, but just as a pre-emptive).Thanks in advance for anything you're inclined to put towards the future of EB - we all appreciate it.-Brendan

-What is the funding goal?At this point, our target is around $30,000. If every reasonably active member of the site (generally estimated at around 15,000 members) were to donate, this would be very easy to do. But I think a more reasonable goal would be to get around 3000 members to donate about $10 each. Even that may understandably be a stretch, but it's what we're shooting for...

-What does the timeline look like?The project is progressing already, split in two main phases. The first - to generally update and stabilize the existing look of the current site - should be ready by the top of 2018. The second half - implementation of new features and development - would be in place by Spring 2018.

-What is my donation paying for?Donations cover the costs of paying a design firm to execute the upgrades needed for the site. With the goal of making sure that EB is both stabilized in it's current form and that it moves into a position of being able to be upgraded and adaptable in the future, we needed to take the approach of designing the site from scratch instead of just trying to tweak the current state of things. In the event that we raise more than expected, funds will be applied to future server costs and/or to look at other further site developments.

-Will I lose my account information -- saved collection, FS/FT, and ISOs?The hope and expectation is that ALL data will be transferred over to the new site without loss. This means everything from all database listings and information to every account and member list (FS/FT, ISO, and Collections) within that. Depending on when the transfer occurs and when the upgraded facets go live to the public, it's possible that a few days worth of data may lost in the migration, but not entire accounts (and their lists) wiped out or anything.